This invention generally relates to altering contents of Web pages; and, more specifically, the invention relates to methods and systems of altering automatically the properties of specific content within a Web page without manual intervention.
In recent years, a unique distributed database has emerged in the form of the World-Wide Web (Web). The database records of the Web are in the form of pages accessible via the Internet. On the Web, tens of millions of pages are accessible by anyone having a communications link to the Internet.
The pages of the Web are dispersed over millions of different computer systems all over the world. Users of the Internet constantly desire to locate specific pages containing information of interest. The pages can be expressed in a number of different character sets, including English, French, German, Spanish, Cyrillic, Kanakata and Mandarin. In addition, the pages can include specialized components, such as embedded forms, executable programs, JAVA applets and hypertext.
The pages of the Web can be constructed using various formatting conventions, for example, ASCII text, Postscript files, html files, and Acrobat files. The pages can include links to multimedia information content other than text, such as audio, graphics, and moving pictures. As a complexity, the Web can be characterized as an unpredictable random update, insert and delete database with a constantly changing morphology.
In order to increase the usability of a Web site, it is desirable to indicate in which section of the site the page the user is currently viewing is located by highlighting the section name within the left-hand navigation. Current processes for doing this require either the hard coding of the highlighted section into each individual Web page, or the creation of several server side includes for each variation. Either process requires manual editing of HTML and SSI files if new sections are added or section names are altered.